SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Ilya Dudkin at Skywell Software has a story
Top 7 Dying Programming Languages to Avoid Studying in 2019 –2020.
Each language gets a paragraph's treatment as to why he thinks these languages are dead or dying. Those languages are:
- Visual Basic
- Objective-C
- Perl
- COBOL
- CoffeeScript
- Scala
- Lisp
Do you agree with his assessment? Are there any other language(s) you would add to the list?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Top 7 Dying Programming Languages to Avoid Studying in 2019 –2020
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 195 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Hey, wait a minute!! I want a divorce!! ... you're not Clint Eastwood!!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zocalo on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:41PM (2 children)
Python seems to have supplanted Perl for much of the backend/admin scripting of Linux etc., so possibly, although there's still a LOT of Perl in the traditional LAMP stacks that is going to be around for a long time, not to mention extremely popular tools like SpamAssassin that use it. Have to disagree with TFA on that one.
In too minds on COBOL - yes, there was a brief resurgence for updating legacy code for Y2K and a good deal of of that code is probably still chugging along, but surely, *surely*, we're not going to have another do-over in 2038?
Similar situation on the rest; I knew CoffeeScript had something to do with Java, but thought it was probably another Apple thing (mixed up with Cocoa, I suspect), and that Scala has been losing traction for a while. I did some recursive coding in Lisp at university but found Prolog much easier to work with and only used Lisp when I had to but, then again, I'm not an Emacs fan and I think that uses Lisp for scripting, in which case I suspect it's going to linger around a LOT longer than the author of TFA might expect.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday March 12 2020, @04:09AM (1 child)
CoffeeScript has to do with Javascript. I remember it existing over 10 years ago, well before Javascript really exploded and it started evolving in a more standardized manner. These days, just use Ecmascript 2018 or whatever the latest version is, or TypeScript if you don't hate yourself.
Scala is within my domain, and I can confidently say don't use it for production code. It can be fun to mess around in if you like type system logic puzzles, but it's underlying premise - mix pure functions with side effecting, exception throwing code in whatever way works for you - is fatally flawed. Maybe Dotty (Scala 3) will be better, but it's been coming for 8+ years now and it still isn't giving up this ludicrous idea that you can safely ignore runtime exceptions even when accepting first-class functions that have no meaningful way to prevent runtime exceptions. Also, most people don't like type system logic puzzles.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday March 12 2020, @08:52AM
I've read a few articles on Scala, amongst lots of other niche/obscure languages since they feature in a monthly magazine I subscribe to, and while it sounds like it would absolutely have an appeal to certain types of coder I'm definitely not one of those any more. I was pretty good at low level coding in Assembly and C back in the day - including all those ugly hacks that would have people running for the hills screaming in terror these days - e.g. I'd have no problem with self-modifying assembly to squeeze all the code into a few KB or less - but these days my coding it limited mostly to hacking out a bit of script to fix some problem or automating some repetetive task.
And probably still sending people running for the hills, screaming in terror... :)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!